The Antifragile Manifesto
Beyond performance & resilience
Beyond performance & resilience
The notions of Performance and Resilience are at once both opposing and synergistic. Sometimes in apparent conflict, sometimes deeply dependent on the other, they are two sides of one coin – an ever–present dichotomy. In today’s connected world, we expect things to “just work”. We rely on their performance regardless of the context in which we are having the experience. For Marketers, and marketing Technologists, we can summarize this with a simple phrase – always on performance is table stakes.
In human terms the pursuit of best performance is an enduring, ever–increasing race to “on–ness” – the state of performing according to specification, as opposed to “off–ness” – the state of not performing to specification. That this state is transitory and mutable is the subject at hand.
A real world analogy can be found in the performing arts. A stand–up comedian is said to have an "on" night or an "off" night, and the difference is a matter of performance – the same jokes are delivered in either case, but one night the set meets expectations and another night it doesn't.
Advances in technology have leapfrogged the ability of systems to be created at scale and increased our ability to be ever more performant and ever more resilient. For most technologists, at the heart of this pursuit lies the Scope Document – the specification to which a given system must adhere and return to as quickly as possible in the event of disruption. In this paper we propose a different way of thinking about the design of applications, systems or groups. In this new model we build upon the notion of reactive architectures by deliberately seeking out disturbances and learning from the result. It is a notion called Antifragile, first proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and we expand on this thinking by combining it with the practice of Improvisation as a pathway to creating architectures that benefit from tinkering.
Improvisation is the process of devising a solution to a requirement by making–do, despite absence of resources that might be expected to produce a solution. Improvisation in music is a much–prized skill that is taught in music schools and requires meticulous practice based on sound foundational training to produce.
Classic examples of a technology approach are the re–engineering of carbon dioxide scrubbers with the materials on hand during the Apollo 13 space mission, or the use of a knife in place of a screwdriver to turn a screw. Who among us has not done this at least once?
Improvisation is not chaos, despite what engineering schools will tell you. Improvisation in the arts, especially in music, has structure and form; it has order and strategy. It takes enormous amounts of continuous practice to perfect and, as it turns out, the moments of musical bliss achieved by the masters of improvisation dovetail neatly into Nassim Taleb’s demonstration of the convexity bias
It is incumbent upon all who are leaders in the Marketing Technology universe to inculcate a culture supportive of this kind of thinking. All the strategies and tactics in the world have no meaning in a culture of rigidity and fanatic adherence to a scope document. Moreover, we need a culture that encourages tinkering.
Tinkering, not just chance or trial and error, is at the heart of the ability to improvise. It is only through the continued practice of trying and learning from failure that any system, person or organism can prepare for the inevitable occurrence of that rare event that cannot be predicted.